According to Fernandez Arnesto in Truth, there exists four ways of the pursuit of knowledge: Feeling, authority, rationality, and empiricism. Feeling accordingly is the truth we feel inside whether it is a gut feeling or an instinct. Authority is obtaining truth from a person with access to a truth world; this authority is seen to know absolute truth. Rationality is reasoning within ourselves why things happen. And finally, empiricism is based on our senses and observation. All of these ways of knowing contain merits and weaknesses. Consequently, the logical approach to obtaining knowledge is utilizing the advantages of each way of knowing.
However in my life I have focuses. A big focus of mine is performing well in college, and learning my major of computer science. Another focus is keeping in tact with God, and my moral way of living. As a result, rationality and authority are my main focuses in the pursuit of knowledge. That is not to say I do not think lower of feeling or empiricism. I understand their benefits, and perhaps if I was a biology major, my main way of knowing would be empiricism because I would be observing more data. Feeling as well I believe is a good indicator of how life is going. Rationality however is embedded into computer science, so I must coincide with that.
I believe we all are born with the same mind. From this, our experiences begin to shape the way we think and act. The best example I can give of this is to imagine the mind as a seed being planted. From the seed comes a tree, the roots are our beliefs, and branches are our personalities and the actions we perform. Hence we all have the choice of where we wish to spread our roots. The choices we make can be feeling or authority provoked, or because of rational or empirical reasons, but in short we all have the freedom of choice of how to think.
In this freedom of choice comes responsibility, which ties in with our morals. We choose not to steal even...